Sugar – The Great Eating Sabotage

Self-Sabotage #7 Sugar! Sometimes there is one particular food that sabotages our eating, and for many, that self-sabotaging food is sugar. As we all know, there are a lot of obvious problems with sugar. It’s addictive, it terrible for our health, it rots our teeth, and we eat way, way too much of it.

Insulin surges

A cold, thick flavored coffee drink can have as many as 16 teaspoons of sugar per serving. This presents a huge challenge for our body, which only wants to have one teaspoon of sugar circulating in our bloodstream at any one time. These jolts of sugar result in insulin surges that contribute to high triglycerides, high cholesterol, increased fat production, reduced fat burning capability and reduced HDL. We are not designed for such frequent and dramatic insulin surges. We are eating more sugar than the last 20 generations of our ancestors! In 1800 we ate roughly 10 pounds of sugar per person per year. In 2015 we ate 200 pounds per person per year. That’s a lot of sweet!

What’s driving our behavior?

If you are someone who is caught in the grip of sugar and can’t seem to give it up, we must look under the hood to discover what’s driving our behavior. We know it’s terrible for us. It’s clearly bad for our health. We know it can be addictive. It adds to our unwanted weight. So why can’t we stop?

First of all, we must accept responsibility for our role in our own self-sabotaging eating. We can’t blame everyone else for this one. Once we notice that we are doing this to ourselves, we must pick through the mental muck to get to the motives.

Rebel? Failure? Feeling Helpless?

Are we eating sugar to further our role as a rebel? Maybe we have an attachment to control and we play that out by eating in a way that pushes against authority.

Perhaps we are eating sugar to further our attachment to rejection. If we eat sugar, we will surely feel defeated and, thus, we can feel that rejection through self-defeat and discouragement every time we indulge in the forbidden food.

Maybe we are furthering our attachment to feelings of failure and every time we succumb to sugar we are strengthening this emotion.

Perhaps we are attached to feelings of disapproval that might have stemmed from childhood. Maybe a parent disapproved of us in some way and we reuse and recycle this feeling of disapproval of ourselves every time we eat sugar when we know we shouldn’t.

Lastly, maybe we are simply unable to stand up for ourselves. Maybe our inner critic has gotten loud and obnoxious and has nudged us to eating sugar. We don’t have the fortitude to say “no” to our inner bully and we eat the sugar like a helpless victim.

Find the answer to move forward

Once we pinpoint which reason, or which attachment, is driving our self-sabotaging behavior, we can begin to unwind that behavior. It doesn’t do much good to simply say, “I shouldn’t eat sugar, sugar’s bad for me.” We all know that! However, if we can recognize that we are indulging in sugar because we unconsciously want to fulfill a feeling of rebellion, we can then realize that rebellion might have been necessary when we were twelve, but is not an appropriate action for us anymore.

Author: Staley Sednaoui, MS

Staley’s goal is to teach her clients the underlying foundations of functional nutrition, individualized for each person, so that they are motivated and educated to make changes and, as a result, enjoy long lasting improved health.

Staley's goal is to teach her clients the underlying foundations of functional nutrition, individualized for each person, so that they are motivated and educated to make changes and, as a result, enjoy long lasting improved health.

Staley's goal is to teach her clients the underlying foundations of functional nutrition, individualized for each person, so that they are motivated and educated to make changes and, as a result, enjoy long lasting improved health.